Well, there's more to being a school janitor than just cleaning the hallways.

They deal with the heating system, the hotwater boiling system, and the circuit breaker panels, they clean up things that could potentially hurt children (such as broken glass), deal with graffiti (which generally requires power buffing and/or repainting), look over safety gear like fire extinguishers and sprinkler systems to make sure everything is up to date, then at the end of the day they have to turn everything off, lock everything up, and set the alarms.

None of those asks are really the sort of things kids should be forced to deal with; they are dangerous, time consuming, and need to be left to someone who knows how to deal with them.

As for food staff, my elementary school didn't have a cafeteria, and my high school's cafeteria was run by students from the Food Industry class under the supervision of the teacher.

I'd also point to the overall mean average school size (total pupils/total schools), which is lower in Japan than it is in the USA.

I'm also rather confused as to what you are referring to when you mention the "servant class" and "unworthy poor". I dunno about the US or Japan but school janitors can make some decent money up here.

Oh, we have a guy for all that stuff, the kids just do the basic cleaning. I wouldn't say he was a janitor, so much as a maintenance and ground keeping guy. And as far as I know, even in the US, most actual maintenance/ heating system stuff is not done by the janitors but by some other general maintenance guys (my father worked as one in my school district for a while)

I'm referring to the attitude an awful lot of people in the US have towards service workers. I know a lot of people who will, for example, toss shit on the floor or the ground at some establishment and then say that they're "giving someone a job" when what they are actually doing is making someone's pre-existing job harder. There is a lot of scorn for the poor in general and for service workers in particular from a depressingly large section of the American public.

You can see some of this scorn (well, a lot of it) in Newt's attitude about the poor, in the way he thinks laziness is the cause of poverty.

Faith in humanity means you believe we can keep getting better, not that you blindly deny the crap that currently exists in spite of all evidence. That's not "faith in humanity" so much as it's "turning a blind eye because you don't want to admit it's there or listen to anyone who has experienced problems."

Mistaking one for the other is just self-righteous with an extra side of blind cruelty.

But where is this happening, where is this denial of being to handle money based on gender, and where is a court ruling saying that the woman has to enjoy rape? I'm talking about recently, just because these ideas are held by idiotic minorities, I'm thinking that the majority that passed those new laws won't let that happen. But complaining about it happening in the past is stupid. Fight it now and forget what has already been delt with, and if those ideas come back up squash them down.

You were clued into marital rape earlier, right? Did they inform you that it wasn't until the 90's that it was actually criminalized in the US? Do you think that kind of thing has nothing to do with attitudes that pre-date it? It took until last year for the FBI to change their classification of rape to something that more accurately reflects reality.

It's like you have such a narrow view of what you think bad looks like, you can't accept anything that doesn't fit those specific examples you're demanding, but your demands are flawed because you don't know what you're talking about and are working from extremely limited information and definitions.

Go take a few 101 women's studies and women's history classes. It's not up to the rest of us to forcefully drag you up to speed in order to actually have a conversation. Do your own damn homework.

Why should I have to do homework for something you guys consider critical thinking would let me understand, if it's that difficult to see the problems you need a fucking class to see them, then maybe their not as big as you want them to be.

All I know is that women were what on in the past and that steadily heir lives are improving, to the point where you have a degree for learning about how you are fixing and have fixed these problems.

You need accurate data to plug into logical premises, and at the moment you are clearly lack that data. Needing critical thinking doesn't mean that's all you need. Reading comprehension and some kind of actual memory retention are kind of crucial as well.

Well then sorry, I have ADHD so memory retention is kinda fucking hard, asshole.

Is there a poe/godwins law equivalent for this sort of horseshit?

"I'm sorry I said all women are whores but I used a public toilet and caught an aspergers."_________________Once, at a local NOW meeting where I was the only male among about a dozen women, a feminism trivia contest was held. I came in third.

i'm gonna pin the blame for some of this latest rothidetastrophe on the way we teach history to our children. it's always presented as this tale of relentless progress from our barbaric beginnings to the present day, and so while we're told that things like Jim Crow laws and marital rape exemptions are bad, we aren't really told why they're bad, and so we have no grasp on how what underwrites racism and sexism and all the rest live on into the present day. 'cuz we gave women the vote so that means we defeated sexism, right, so what are them broads bellyachin' about now, probably that time of the month again anyway, y'know what i'm sayin'? and the corollary of telling history as a tale of never-ending progress is that, once you've obscured the problems that remain and the roots of abolished past injustices that linger and infect us still, you lose the idea that history is a story of progress that we have to continue. rather, it starts to look like it ends with us, we slew the dragon, the princess was in this castle after all, all their base are belong to us, hip hip hooray, we're done fighting for social justice because we won.

which makes the fight that much more difficult, because by its very nature, you're fighting something well-entrenched in social consciousness, and the things you have to fight aren't nearly as overt as not letting women vote because we don't want to worry their dainty little female brains with such tough and complicated matters as politics. which is why you can't convince people like Rothide that this actually matters; as far as he's concerned, we defeated sexism, and he thinks that because its most overt and obvious manifestations are pretty much gone, and he can't or won't look for the roots that go underground and nourish those manifestations, and still others that he doesn't recognize. and asking him to go further and consider how much of it still affects him is obviously futile, because he doesn't want to go any further; going any further would threaten ideas and privileges that he appears to cherish, at least enough not to want to give them up for the sake of social justice.

That's still a better alternative to telling history as how I was taught:
"In 1547, xy war happened.
In 1550, this event happened.
In 1942 august 20, this event happened.
In 1942 october 5, this event happened."

The "what exactly happened", the "why did it happen", and "what conclusions can be made" were missing, all we learned were dates and events. Don't ask me how that is useful in any way, but I personally am somewhat clueless about history as a result. In fact, we didn't even learn about 20th century history, because we ran out of time.

So when it comes to important ideas like this, you end up having no idea about what exactly happened, and construct your own interpretation of things based on the limited amount of things you've gathered randomly from places, maybe its source being mere intuition or concepts of others. And considering the person at hand figures out this interpretation, they do their best to hold onto it. "But I'm sure I couldn't have been wrong!"

Others talking about history tends to be interesting, as a result. Especially if they know what they're talking about.

Last edited by Zhuinden on Mon May 06, 2013 8:54 am; edited 1 time in total

"I'm sorry I said all women are whores but I used a public toilet and caught an aspergers."

His behavior, and demands for very specific address of his very specific thoughts on his own terms actually does remind me of how my asperger's friends act. Who knows?

I do have sympathy for some things being hard, but it all kind of dissolves into a massive sea of annoyance when people pull that card to try to excuse themselves completely from seeing outside of themselves. Having a disorder or condition that makes certain behaviors and tasks difficult isn't mutually exclusive with also just plain being an asshole. You don't get carte blanche for self-absorbed assholery just because something is hard.

unfortunately, i've been looking into it and it seems like brains don't do very well in the repotting process. it's almost as if they're attached to a variety of nerves and muscles and blood vessels and such.

this was a great disappoint to me, since there are often times where i'd like to trade in the brain i've got now, which often thinks of nothing but robots when i'm trying to work, but whaddya gonna do.